Topic

Brazil

Rebecca Tarlau reviews Jonathan Smucker’s Hegemony How-To, and argues that in addition to building stronger working-class, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-imperialist movements in the United States, the political alignment we build should be international, connecting with the many other working-class groups that are fighting against the same oppressive political and economic system.

Hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy are categorized as natural disasters, yet the disparate impacts of these catastrophic events on vulnerable populations suggest that social disasters may be a more accurate descriptor. Rebecca Rasch investigates the interplay between natural disasters and social structures in Brazil.

How do relationships between left-leaning political parties and social movements change over time? Rebecca Tarlau looks at the case of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT), examining the complexity of state-society relations — asking whether social movements can be “prefigurative” while still contesting state power.

The Berkeley Journal of Sociology is run by a collective of graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. It seeks to contribute to the “history of the present” by publishing critical sociological perspectives on current social, economic, political, and environmental issues.